Proof of Love (thoughts on Othello)
But, Othello, speak.
Did you by indirect and forcèd courses
Subdue and poison this young maid’s affections?
Or came it by request, and such fair question
As soul to soul affordeth?
(1.3.110–114)
How do you prove love? The question is put to Othello in the first act by Venetian nobles and the solution is not so simple. Unlike the nobility of Othello, which is provable by his acts and services,[1] the fact of the matter of love isn’t knowable through ocular evidence. So Othello has to appeal to testimony: he asks that they send for Desdemona and let her speak (and presumably trust that she speaks the truth—and therefore isn’t under magical deception). And while they wait for her, he relays his own story of their courtship, to which the duke replies approvingly, imagining that his own daughter would have likewise been wooed by Othello’s tale of odyssey. So is love proven? It’s hard to say. The duke’s reply is ambivalent in precisely this way: a sensible listener can’t know that she does love him, only that a woman would. The slide into generality affirms the plausibility of love, not its presence. Moreover, Othello is let off the hook, not because Desdemona manages to persuade. She isn’t believed by Brabantio, but understood as having made a terrible choice. So is love proven? Perhaps not then. And the question continues to haunt the play, in a transformed, more pernicious way. Instead of demanding love be proven to the polity, now it must be proven to the lover. And what is striking is this: it is not just as hard—as impossible—it is fatal.
I suppose I am driving at this: love can’t be proven.
In seminar, it was suggested that Desdemona shouldn’t have lied about losing the handkerchief. Imagine if she had just told Othello! Would that have changed the course of events? We want our lover to be honest. And we live with the fact that we can’t ever know for sure. We all know someone—or at least have seen the type cast on screen—who needs to know with certainty, and that need often starts to resemble the desire to catch the other in a lie. In Othello, that is exactly what unfolds. Desdemona doesn’t confess to losing the handkerchief, but it hardly matters. Othello isn’t waiting for the truth; he’s already replaced it with a suspicion that no confession can dislodge. His demand is not for understanding but for confirmation. He wants to eliminate ambiguity, to render love visible, proven, guaranteed. And it is that desire—not the concealments themselves—that makes the tragedy inevitable. To paraphrase my exasperation: the tragedy does not lie in the characters’ efforts to conceal; it lies in the effort to overcome concealment, to make love transparent, to drive out the opacity that marks the reality of love.[2]
I say that opacity marks the reality of love, but of course it is a severed reality. So perhaps it is not so crazy that Othello wants to overcome it and return to the status integritatis, when man and woman are united “in one flesh“; that is to say, bare, without the mediation of corporeal signs, truly as one soul to another soul. But it is not clear that one can go back. At least, it is not clear that one can go back by forcing the distance away and make the lover knowable. Perhaps we discover in this play that the desire to know has a tendency to deteriorate and transgress. In forcing the other to open it misrepresents and destroys the other. So really it is the progenitor of lies[3] and death—all in parody of Genesis 3, I suppose.
If I have more energy I’d now turn to examine Odyssey, which has a different grammar of love than Genesis, and which Othello also gestures towards (by casting Desdemona loosely in the role of Nausicaa). Odysseus and Penelope face a similar problem: how do you recognize each other? And the stakes are so high; it is a matter of life and death—and love. They manage to do it, and remarkably not through honesty but trickery and playful lies, staged encounters, and cloaked presence. And the final recognition keeps getting delayed. It’s really very beautiful stuff. But I can’t say much about it now, except that concealment here is a sort of poiesis integral to love and knowledge: Let us be lovers as storytellers, or something like that.
[1] Even the demonstration of nobility is fraught—racialized. But that’s a separate train of thought.
[2] And do we need to know Desdemona’s innocence? Would it have been less of a tragedy if she cheats? What a weird place to be in the audience—to be in the “know”. Are we really? In the “know” of what?
[3] Not absolutely. I mean, IAGO.
——————————————
I resolved last Monday to write daily—then weekly. And then neither happened. A moment of reckoning. It’s true that I never found writing effortless; it had always been a process of painful tinkering, circling important things and not getting there, trying out formulations until the pressure of deadline forces out something tolerable. But I am so out of practice now—since becoming a tutor—that even the art of bad tinsmithing feels unfamiliar. Is it too late for new year resolutions? I have never done it before. And Nowruz was not long ago. So maybe not. Spring is here—time for something small to take root. I will keep writing every week, something short and incomplete, but honest and timely, capturing thoughts on program texts when they are still fresh.
